3.1.1 setup advice please

You are here:

I'm pretty new to Glassfish, very new in fact, just inherited the current setup at work which consists of around 45 small applications running on 7 physical Dell 1U servers and 5 VM's. All the servers are running Glassfish 2.2 on SLES 10.

There's no clustering involved, no need for them to be HA, just these applications running on stand-alone instances, so between 5 - 7 apps on a single box. Whilst performance is good I'd like to move to 3.1.1, perhaps virtualising the whole landscape.

I've installed 3.1.1 on some test servers, ideally I'd like a setup where each application could be ring-fenced in some way plus a way in which I could manage the deployments from a single GUI interface. I'm presuming if I do this I would need to go down the route of creating remote instances on other nodes?

I'm interested to see what others out there had done or what they would do in my situation???

Once you determine what you are going to do, please report back. It
will be interesting to hear what you decided.

One choice is to do the following:
- one domain with a DAS
- create a node for each physical system and each VM
- create a stand-alone instance for each application (45 instances)
- deploy the applications to the instances.

This allows you to manage the entire setup from a single admin console
and all applications are isolated in their own JVMs.

If some applications can run together in a shared JVM, then the number
of instances can be reduced.
If some applications need more than one instance for scalability or
reliability, then clusters can be created.

With this setup, the DAS will not have any trouble managing this many
instances.